1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to electrical power generation and more specifically to data center cooling system having electrical power generation, which utilizes heat generated by servers to cool the data center and generate electrical power.
2. Discussion of the Prior Art
The advent of the computer desktop brought about opportunities and freedoms as well latitude in personal and work time. During the decade of the eighties and nineties, the exponential growth of desktops started to acclaim to everyday life. Education started to use computers for teaching on hardware and software while in the business world computers started to appear to increase productivity. As computers became the norm in everyday life, they started to get more sophisticated which lead to the next step in computer technology, network connectivity.
As a result of the computer network, the logarithmic growth allow society to have freedoms and receive a better quality of life. The next step in computer technology was the interconnection of networks; as a result, the internet came into play. Now with the internet, networks could connect via new software and hardware technologies. The next step brought upon the spread of the internet was the data center, which nowadays is the where most of the information and data that is the internet resides. Broadband, Wi-Fi and cellular technology now allows mobile users to move about and request data from these data centers, which in kind has led to an exponential growth of data centers all over the world. Due to the exponential growth in size, one aspect which has contributed to a major problem is the use of energy for cooling large arrays of rack servers. Although problems with security, location, and size are a major factor, companies have tried to promote consolidating of solutions to their users, as a way to provide a green data center. The use of virtualization, co-location, and use of the natural ability of using nature as for cooling aspect of data centers. The data center of today still has the fundamental task of targeting the lowest power usage effectiveness in their business model.
A fundamental inability of the grouping of servers in a rack enclosure is the dismal approach of force fanning in order to expel heat energy from within the server rack. The approach of placing multiple servers in series in a horizontal plane culminates in adding additional fans on the server rack enclosure and cooling apparatuses providing the force cooling. This fundamental approach adds to the amount of energy require, not only because heat is dissipated in the horizontal plane, which is counterintuitive to the natural phenomena of heated air to move naturally up.
Yet another approach to removal of heat accumulated by few hundred to thousands of servers is the use of green energy. This approach takes into effect by using the natural thermal conditions of air and water in certain geographical locations. This approach takes into account the seasonal times, whereas the cold air of the winter increases the efficiency by naturally cooling a data center. In addition, use of hydropower as a means of using the power derive as a fundamental approach of using green energy of hydropower as an acceptable approach. Although, both approaches are viable, they neglect to take into account the use of cool air during seasons only. In addition, the use of hydropower is viable as long as the power is continuous, although due to climate changes or droughts not all locations are able to use hydropower on a twenty-four hour a day, three hundred sixty five days of the year for years onward.
Recently another approach of cooling data centers or dissipating the heat accumulated by hundreds to thousands of servers in a data center is the use of immersion cooling. Although, not a novel approach the immersion of electronic motherboard servers and related equipment and dipping them in a liquid solution does alleviates the heat from accumulating at the sources, it has to take into account that not all servers are made alike specifically with the materials of all electronic components. Other fundamental shortcomings of immersion cooling is the limitation to using disk drives whereby a cooling liquid solution could be catastrophic if the particular hard disk at a particular time being use is open. Another fundamental hurdle is the movement physically of servers and racks from use for maintenance or malfunction; it is not as easy as moving the servers or components in an open-air room.